In trying to develop an understanding of conscious activity, i.e., behavior that is known to the individual behaving, we dealt with such unusual ideas that at least a brief review of the high-lights is required. We have distinguished man from animals on the basis of man's ability to think, and his ability to be conscious; we have discussed animals as behaving without any consciousness of their behavior; and we have concluded consciousness must be an essential characteristic and vice versa. We have also noted that psychology -- in its truest sense -- is limited to the study of human behavior; and that animals could only be studied to elucidate part of this behavior -- in particular, that part of human behavior that does not necessarily require consciousness or thinking. We have yet to consider the ability common to all humans to become -- and to be -- conscious of themselves and their behavior. Since the ability to be conscious is essential to distinctly human behavior, we have, in a sense, arrived back at the beginning of our study -- developing the common basis of all psychological consideration.
What is indicated is that the establishment of values -- (as used in our original definition) -- is not merely a function of the thinking process, but --indeed-- its very essence. This of course was included inherently in our basic premise and development. Thinking establishes for any individual his values (or rather, those of which he is conscious) and it is also concerned with the interplay of values -- or thoughts -- within himself. Psychology, as we have defined it, is essentially the same, but is not limited to considerations within the individual. Yet from the individual's point of view they are the same. Indeed, if one considers a single individual ("the last man on earth") -- psychology and the thinking process become identical.
I cannot resist making an interesting (maybe only personally so) note in this respect. In my essay "Rationale" I made two rather bold statements:
"I am a universal entity.", and
"I can apply assumptions (thoughts) about myself very generally to the human race."
These statements represent the same equation, or relationship, of an individual -- through his thinking process -- with all other individuals, or with humanity. Many writers, poets, and philosophers before me have expressed in essence the same, or at least very similar concepts; e.g., the ancient admonishment -- "Know thyself", or Whitman's "I, the cosmos". Such relationships can adequately define for us the notion of "personal psychology" even though they be only a part of the possible total relationship of an individual to society. And it is this relationship with which we are primarily concerned, not simply the forces at play within the individual on the one hand, but also the forces at play with the society on the other. The relationship bowever is reciprocal so that either one is a reflection of the other -- thinking being the attempt to understand this relationship from the individual's view point; personal psychology an attempt to understand the relationship from society's view point. Yet both points of view interlap and can be identified with each other, especially since "society's" attempt to understand is, in effect, an attempt of individuals to understand "collectively", so to speak.
The next step, obviously implied in the preceding paragraph, is to recognize that society is simply an addition (or multiplication) of individuals. In the same way, general psychology is a multiplication of personal psychologies. The individual actually reflects society; and society in turn is a reflection of individuals. Though the relationship is reciprocal, it is necessary to bear in mind that "society" is more a reflection of the "individual" than is the individual a reflection of his society. In fact, "society" could not exist without the individual, and hence the individual must have primacy. He cannot possibly be "victimized" by his society to reflect its errors except through ignorance or choice. At best, he could only be victimized -- not by "society" -- but by particular individuals of his society -- the identity, the number, and the generation of the "tyrants" being relatively unimportant to this consideration.
However, the manner in which individuals are "victimized" by the errors of others can be important to us right now particularly since many past errors have been incorporated -- though subtly -- into the language we use, and we will victimize those who follow us unless we can remove the errors that are incorporated in language and refrain from creating new ones. Now, since individuals are victimized by ignorance or choice, the least we can do in analyzing the language we use is to choose the definitions which appear to be (in the light of our present knowledge) freest from error. In such a manner we guard against being victimized (and vuctimizing others) through choice, yet in our ignorance we can still make and incorporate errors in our definitions and our language. However, by constantly analyzing and stating the reasons of our choice we minimize the problem because the errors that appear later on will pin-point our present areas of ignorance, and knowing the choices we made, we can easily re-evaluate them to remove the errors.
The statement that language can be a tool -- much like a two edged sword -- with the ability to have profound effects on individuals might appear strange at first. Obviously language itself as language divorced from ideas and feelings, i.e., abstracted from a subjective context, could not possibly have such ability. But language is never abstracted from a subjective context; in fact, we could probably write a mathematical expression to show the proportionality between the degree of abstraction (from a subjective context and meaninglessness: i.e., for any language, or any word, to have any meaning it must arrouse the subjective consciousness, subject to error and bias, imagination, etc. Language is not the only tool that enables us to arrouse the subjective consciousness but it is an important one, and in the context of a book it is pretty much the only one. No word exists in our minds as a thought without having some psychological significance related to its association with the experiences from which we learned that word, and its association with other words and the experiences from which they were derived. Why else would "free association" be such an important psychological phenomena?
Now again we have to settle on some terminology which is somewhat involved, and we have to settle it in a somewhat arbitrary way. The fact that the choices we make may be somewhat arbitrary doesn't mean that the choices are invalid, but simply that at this time the distinctions that we have to make could be made in several ways, and at this time it is difficult to determine the best choice.
The best way, generally, is to stick as closely as possible to the usual, common sense notions of the terms involved, and to set up a method of using those terms to incorporate the necessary distinctions. If later on our choices prove inadequate we can return to this point of differentiation and re-define our terms as we did (I hope successfully) with the added distinction to the term "life" as distinguished from the previous term characterized as "biological life".
Thinking -- or the thinking process -- as usually considered involves at least two processes:
1) The formation of thoughts, and
2) Their subsequent development.
All the books on the thinking process, as far as I have been able to establish, make no real distinction between these two processes -- and that appears to be the primary difficulty concerning the general understanding of the subject. It is generally considered that "thinking" involves both: i.e., it involves all the processes involved in the formation and development of thoughts. A distinction is necessary. We shall consider thinking to be limited to only the formation of thoughts so that we can make the following statements without reservation. If a thought exists, someone is thinking. If someone is thinking, a thought exists. Once a thought is formed, it can be represented in some way, e.g., by a symbol. A symbol represents a thought, but is not a thought. A change in the symbol can be brought about by a change in the thought that it represents, with a concurrent change in its representation; or, a change in the symbol can be brought about without any change in the thought that it represents: i.e., by accident; e.g., the stone tablet on which I have etched the symbol might fall and break with a part of the symbol being obliterated.
There are many ways of representing thoughts. Let us suppose that I have represented a thought by picking up letters cut out of cardboard. The letters I picked to represent my thought are:
Now we could have the idea that we would like to form all the thoughts that have been represented by the five symbols: T S M E A . We could think about it, arranging and re-arranging the symbols in all possible combinations. But, suppose someone gave us a little black box that could arrange those symbols in every possible combination: i.e., "shake" our symbols in an orderly rather than random fashion. Would the box be capable of thinking as we did? Of course not. The rearrangement of symbols doesn't necessarily involve thinking. Yet the black box would perform the same operation of arranging and rearranging that we would do by thinking. But you might say, we can recognize the "good" combinations and discard the "bad" ones, and therefore we can think but the box cannot. Well, suppose further that at the exit of the box there were gates that were so constructed that the letters could come out only in certain sequences; i.e., only those combinations of these symbols that was found in a dictionary. Then the only combinations that come out are the ones that represent "thoughts". Still, I'm sure that we would agree that the box itself is not capable of thinking though the person who constructed such a box must have been.
The important idea that we must get at is that the representation of thoughts can be changed without thinking being involved. We all appreciate that such changes can occur as a result of thinking, but dwelling on that point alone will not let us develop our understanding.
Let us recapitualate and set up some basic definitions to include these distinctions. So far we have defined thinking as the formation of thoughts -- nothing more, nothing less. Any subsequent development or processing of a thought once formed would then be referred to as the "processing of thoughts", or the "thought process". Obviously if we are to process a thought within the realm of pure thought, the process would occur concurrently, with thinking because in the realm of pure thought the development of the original thought requires the formation of other thoughts in relation to it. But we have noted that representations of thoughts (e.g., symbols) can be processed both with and without thinking; i.e., with and without the concurrent formation of thoughts of all the representation of thoughts or the changes in the representations of thoughts that might be involved in the development. The most important consideration is that the processing of thought representations can occur without thinking. But the processing of the thought representations and the processing of the thoughts themselves are two distinct processes that are very difficult to separate practically since the processing of thoughts themselves implies the processing of their representations as well. This is true because of the inherent difficulties in trying to even imagine pure thought without a sub-stratum of representations as the changing patterns of cellular activity of the brain, or the resulting electromagnetic patterns might be considered to be.
Since these two processes (that of processing thoughts themselves and that of processing their representations) are so closely related as to be practically inseparable at this time, we can simply group them together as being a thought process which can occur with and without thinking. When the thought process occurs with the concurrent formation of thoughts (consciousness), we can refer to it as a "thinking" process because thinking (formation of thoughts) is occuring at every stage of the process. Then thinking plus a thought process equals a thinking process, but thoughts plus processing of thought representations does not equal a thinking process, and the processing of anything that might be considered representations of thoughts is not thinking, nor does it necessarily imply thinking.
The thinking process (as distinguished from the thought process) is the same as "psychology" applied in the framework of a single individual since psychology must include thinking and all the underlying and subsequent processes. The basic difference between them is that psychology can be considered to include unconscious phenomena because it is never restricted within a single framework of a single subject thinking about himself (the province of thinking) where thinking about the unconscious as such is impossible. However, psychology restricted within the framework of a single subject other than the the subject (psychologists) making the consideration can consciously consider what might be unconscious to that other subject. In effect, the psychologist is looking at another individual's thinking (and re-thinking it) with the inclusion of the knowledge and insights that might be unkown to that individual yet play in his thinking process.
Since we are interested in separating the idea of thinking for further analysis especially in terms of psychology, we must carry the 'thinking - thought process' distinction into it. A distinction like psychology (implying thinking) and psychological process (implying no thinking) would tend to leave out the relationship implied in the term "thinking process" because at this point the need for that relationship would tend to make the term "psychological process" apply to processes occuring with and without thinking. So, why not leave it a little anbigous? Let the psychological process refer to processes occurring within the individual that can be associated with thinking whether they are or not at any particular time and utilize the terminology of "conditioned response" or "unconscious process" to denote the part of the process that occurrs without thinking. "Unconscious process" is the better of the two terms since it is fairly obvious that a conditioned response in the usual sense is unconscious and yet we might want to consider the conditioning of responses occurring with thinking. We should also bear in mind that the unconscious process can be, in effect, the processing of representations of thought and might mimic the "conscious" thinking process, or vice versa.
We can show these reciprocal relationships as well as the possibility and manner of their being identified with one another schematically by "trinities" as introduced in the first chapter. It must be understood that the identification of these ideas with one another, or the distinction from each other, depends on the point of view, the subtle distinctions we have made, as well as the manner in which we would wish to use these ideas.
See Figure 8., and/or
To further explore our definition of thinking, in an attempt to understand the nature of the formation of thoughts, let's begin by making some observations about thoughts.
Thoughts are not material entities, they are "spiritual" and must exist within a spiritual entity we might call the mind or soul. The formation of a thought then would involve traversing the gap from the material to the world of the spirit. Exactly how the gap is bridged from the material world to the spiritual world of the thoughts (and the soul) may never be completely definable. The question has engaged philosophers for centuries. But we know that we can feel, even though we are unable to find any necessity or even a reason, for postulating the ability "to feel" in order to understand behaviour from the "conditioned response point of view". "Feeling" is actually a part of the thinking process and can never be separated from it: for, a feeling is not material either. It has already bridged the gap since we are conscious of them. This process of "bridging the gap" is essentially the meaning of "abstracting" which is closely associated with thinking.
Feelings then are abstractions of the conditioned response mechanisms -- that is -- associated with the physical mechanistic response in humans is an ability to feel which is not present in lower forms. We know our feelings, so that our feelings are actually thoughts, primitive thoughts if you will. We can continue to abstract the primary or primitive feeling or abstraction and develop the kind of thoughts that are usually considered "intellectual" rather than "emotional". The difference between emotional and intellectual activity is then simply a difference in the degree of abstraction.
We have skirted the problem of how the gap is bridged by merely recognizing that we have the ability to abstract. We have given some indication of how this occurs by merely noticing that feelings would be associated with physiological responses. We must go one step further and consider how feelings are associated with mechanisms at least partially: What is the mechanism of abstraction? It would be better for us to suspend further considerations until we at least develop a better mutual understanding of what we mean by "mind" and by "soul". And until we can see how these operate in close association with the body to allow the process of abstraction to occur irrespective of the abstraction mechanism.
Man is composed of a body and soul, we've discussed the notion of spiritual "substance" -- as thought --enough not to quibble over the statement. Graphically we could represent yjis as a composite diagram as follows:
From the preceding paragraph we can see that this diagram shows the necessary close association to allow for the process of abstraction. This diagram could also represent the mind. But we usually consider the "mind" to be associated with the activity of the brain. If we wish we could also represent this graphically:
There is one objection to this last diagram. The necessary close association with the body to abstract various "local" feelings is not present. This might not cause too much difficulty since we usually consider all activity of the body to be integrated and interpreted through the activity of the brain. But if one considers carefully whether thinking is associated only through brain activity or not, he must realize that this is only an assumption, which is probably not true, but merely a useful simplification.
We could borrow a concept from the organic chemist and show a truer picture by considering each diagrammatic structure (and the ideas they represent) to be resonant structures as follows:
The double arrows are also borrowed from chemistry in which they signify equilibrium, a reversible reaction, or a reciprocal relationship.
The concept of resonance states simply that neither of the representative structures alone is sufficient to give a true picture, but that each one represents special aspects of the true picture. The combination of the two (or more) equivalent structures gives a truer picture which is to be considered as a combination of the "extremes" shown by each representation -- a "hybrid".
We can even make a diagram of this "hybrid" by considering the mind to be that portion of the soul which operates through the material of the body, particularly the brain. We can show this as a concentration of activity in the brain as a heavier stipling, and not limiting the soul to only the area (volume) occupied by the body like so:
One thing that should be noted is how we resolved the "resonant" structures into a "hybrid", or "truer" picture. All we did was super-impose one representation, or diagram, upon the other as we did earlier with the more simple reprsentation of the body and soul. In this case we "synthesized" the two aspects of man which we had "analyzed" earlier. Such "analysis" and "synthesis" of concepts is analogous with "deductive" and "inductive" reasoning.
We use such processes constantly. Many times we become aware of different aspects of a single entity, or concept, and we can establish (at least mentally) represenrations of these aspects so that we can utilize them separately. On the other hand, we can obtain two concepts separately, and super-impose their "mental representations" to form a composite concept. Since all thoughts are processed within the same framework which contains various representations (such as exist in the memory) one can easily see how they become super-imposed, or associated. Although they are super-imposed upon one another they must retain some of their original characteristics so that they can be utilized separately.
If we consider "feelings" to be "primitive" thoughts as we did earlier, we can see the necessity and general use of these processes. Considering food, we obtain "feelings" of taste, touch, smell, and sight, and perhaps even hearing the "snap, crackle, and pop". All of these "feelings" are the same in the sense that they depend upon the stimuli "touching" or impinging on the sense organs. In effect the composite picture is broken down into components, or "analyzed" by virtue of the different aspects being separated by the "sense" organs. They can be maintained as separate "feelings" by residing in separate centers, or they can be "re-combined" or "associated" by a process of super-imposition in a separate center -- an "associative" center.The separation of stimuli into "centers" is demanded by the requirement that they can operate either separately or in combination.
Although we accomplish such "analysis" and "synthesis" on a conscious level, such processes can occur without thinking, without consciousness. This is the basis of the ability of animals to respond in a very specialized manner (which has been confused with thinking) through the phenomenon of conditioning. We noted that animals were totally unconscious and that computing machines, "robots', and physical systems are capable of accomplishing the same feats as animals. It is very important to recognize the distinction just mentioned previously to recognize that processing what we humans can know as thoughts of itself does not necessarily involve thinking although thinking and consciousness can be associated with these processes.
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